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Monday, September 10, 2018

'Mandy' (2018) Movie Review

There’s a scene in Panos Cosmatos’ new mind-fuck revenge
horror film, Mandy, where a character dips his gloveless
hands into a cistern of pure liquid LSD in the most casual manner imaginable.
The more I think about it, the more that single moment perfectly represents
this bug-nuts crazy, drug-addled, apocalyptic-doomsday-cult-fueled,
chainsaw-fighting, demon-biker-having madness and mania. Sure, dip your bare
hands into this powerful hallucinogen and see what the hell happens. And it’s
glorious.

Set in 1983, deep in the California wilderness, the plot
revolves around Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) and Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough),
two loner outsiders who are madly in love and perfectly content with their
intentionally isolated existence. When a Manson-esque death cult led by Jeremiah
Sand (Linus Roache) comes to town and tears Red’s life apart, he embarks on a
vicious mission of retribution.

That alone sounds like a solid basis for a movie. Nic Cage
on a vengeful rampage against an evil religious sect? Sign me up; I don’t need much
more. But Mandy offers so, so much more. Soaked in a miasma
of stark blues and reds that would make Argento proud, bathed in flickering
lights and psychedelic flourishes, peppered with
Hellraiser-inspired demon-bikers, and layered with a
droning, phantasmagoric score from the late Johann Johannsson that vibrates its
way into the core of your bones, Cosmatos creates an immersive nightmare-scape
that begins as a slow-burn and ratchets up the madness and pressure until
Mandy becomes a screaming manic-episode of a film.

This is peak Nic Cage; this is Cage mainlining PCP and
cranking the dial until it snaps off in his quivering fingers—think screaming
and pounding a bottle of vodka on a toilet, snorting a pile of cocaine off a
shard of glass, bound and gagged in barbed wire and still screaming. But as
jacked up as he gets, he intersperses moments where we remember, oh yeah, this
dude has an Oscar, and for good reason. It’s a psychotic break of a performance
that spans the whole spectrum, from deft and delicate to shrieking and
tooth-gnashing. It’s a wild spectacle.

Why Andrea Riseborough isn’t a huge star is beyond me. While
Cage is a peaking crescendo of broken insanity, she’s quiet and reserved, but
no less unsettling. Reined-in and controlled, she does as much, if not more, to
set the mood and tone as her co-star, adding an off-kilter chill to the
proceedings—Cage is the fire, she’s the ice. She’s such a chameleon, she’s near
unrecognizable from role to role, and though Cage grabs more attention,
Riseborough does the most heavy lifting.

Some people will find Mandy a bit long
and oblique—Cosmatos begins deliberate and methodical, drowning us in his
hyper-stylized aesthetic and soul-rattling score. But it never drags or
dawdles. Even before it goes crazy, it’s all surreal atmosphere and the whole package
paints an unnerving, sinister portrait—it’s a dark, unhinged dream even before
it descends into full-fledged hellish nightmare. Esoteric and psychedelic, ferocious
and gore-soaked, see Mandy in a theater if you can, loud and
bold, confrontational and inescapable. [Grade: A]